


gentle into that good night

by toujours_nigel



Category: Night Watch - Sarah Waters
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-03
Updated: 2013-06-03
Packaged: 2017-12-13 18:56:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/827682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>post-canon, Julia finds her way back to Kay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	gentle into that good night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [filia_noctis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/filia_noctis/gifts).



> Happy Birthday, baby girl!

She runs into Kay by an accident that she hasn’t had to contrive, on a cross-roads the name of which she will never be able to recollect. Years later, when they are telling the story over lunch, she will turn to Kay and Kay will tease her for having forgotten: she can see it quite clearly, the tilt of the smile at the edge of Kay’s mouth, the way her hair spills into the gap at her collar between skin and cloth. There is time for all of it while they are being jostled by the crowd that has spilled out of the movie theatre, and she is pushing her way through it to reach for the edge of the cowl on Kay’s overcoat.

Then there is the immediacy of Kay turning to see her interceptor, of Kay breaking loose with one decisive tug and shoving her way recklessly out of the dispersing crowd and of instinctively, helplessly giving chase. Kay looks, in her suit and at a distance, like a slight, fleet-footed young man, and moves nearly as well as one. Julia runs the length of five buildings in her high heels and narrow skirt before losing sight of her and then leans against a Victorian facade to curse the vagaries of fashion. On the bus-ride home, she wonders what had come over her to have behaved so madly. There is a run in one of her new stockings and she is afraid that the flesh beneath is bleeding into the nylon. She is, besides, disgustingly out of breath and has managed in some absurd way to wrench her girdle subtly out of place.

The moment she gets the door shut behind her—after what she is sure must have looked a very funny walk to her any onlookers—she steps out of her shoes and strips off her dress, slip, brassiere, girdle, stockings. There is no blood, but high on the curve of her calf below the hem of her discarded dress the flesh is purpling beneath the smooth brown of her skin. In any of her novels the heroine would have felt faint with the implicit violence of it; the prose would have caressingly described the bruise as resembling one from a closed fist or a vicious kick, something sordid without the solidity of flesh beneath it. Julia feels vaguely excited by it all. It’s barely a bit of mottled skin, and she hasn’t run for ages, so no wonder that it’s left her breathless and bruised; if she’s shivering it’s only the cold air on her bare skin, and the sagging health of impending middle-age. She will be thirty-five next year, and Kay thirty-six. Helen will be thirty-two, and still fresh and pink and looking, on a good day, barely twenty-five.

It’s an awful thought, especially since it fails entirely to fill her with the proper horror. She waits through two restorative drinks and the slipping on of less restrictive clothing before dismissing the possibility from her mind and idly hunting for the dungarees she used to wear during her stint climbing through windows and over walls during the War; heavy and hard-wearing, not much like the trousers she wears about the house, which Helen had used to like so much.

She discovers them tucked under a pile of frocks from about the same time, at least three of which are decidedly Helen’s, barely unpacked from the Mecklenburgh flat, and finds that her waist has not expanded at all in three years. It is a pleasing thought, in the wake of the realisation of age, though to be really vain she ought go hunting for her school uniform. It’s undoubtedly still wrapped carefully about her lacrosse sticks up in a crate in the garret at home, though it must be worn, after twenty years. Good Lord, so long. Wouldn’t Mrs. Knight have been smug and toad-like about the whole thing, with her diagnoses of emotional immaturity and her hateful predictions about a coldly unfulfilled life? Nothing Julia’s done would match up in her eyes to a home with a husband and a child. Though really Kay had been as good as a husband in their years together, so she is probably a divorced woman, which is probably worse. A divorced woman who’d stolen her husband’s mistress; her husband’s lover; her wife’s mistress. Damn it. She really is drunk, can’t even get that bit of triviality to fall out correctly. At least there aren’t any pages to write, God only knew what hash that’d have become. As it is, she wants another shot or three of whiskey; she feels very strongly that she has earned it. She’s thirty-four years old, and has spent the last six waiting for the woman she has loved for roughly twelve to come to her senses and come back to her.

She has several shots of whiskey to obliterate that revelation from her mind, goes around the flat checking to see that all the doors and windows are bolted, vomits promptly and theatrically, and brushes her teeth before bed to rid her mouth of the unfortunate taste.  She feels certain that a good bit of her dinner has been flushed along with the alcohol, and decides to go to sleep quickly to avoid the resultant hunger: there’s nothing at all in the flat. A count of two thousand sheep later, she is still marvelling at her stupidity in acknowledging any of that even—especially—to herself. As a rule she is honest with herself, but this is one truth that she has successfully spent years avoiding. It isn’t comfortable knowledge, that she’s spoilt her own life, and Kay’s, and Helen’s, because she’s incapable of letting go of—what had been Kay’s elegant little euphemism?—ah, yes, a misaffection. She doesn’t even _write_ women this soppy, for God’s sake; it’s like something out of Barbara Cartland. Though it would all be so much easier in a book like that, a foregone conclusion that she and Kay would work their way back into each other’s lives, with Helen eventually dismissed as an unfortunate detour on the path to happily ever after. What a joke, really, what a goddamned bit of hilarity.

 

When she wakes it is to the realisation that the voided alcohol has taken with it any possibility of merciful oblivion. If anything, the harsh light of day strips her actions of any lingering hues of romantic delusion. She took Helen from Kay to punish her, and Kay undoubtedly knew as much considering even Helen had suspected something of the sort. She had been nice to Helen, and still thinks that she loved the girl, though for nothing even near the entire length of their relationship. It has all been petty and cruel, and the fact that it has made her consistently miserable does not excuse the misery it has doubtless inflicted upon Kay, who she still loves and has loved through the entire six year-long debacle that has been Helen Giniver. There is no possible reparation, really, and she is an awful person, a fester on the populace. She tells herself that quietly over tea, occasionally out loud in Mrs. Knight’s most obnoxious voice, and once in a while for variety in her neighbours’ voices. “You’re an awful person. Work it up your arse!”

She sets the crockery in the kitchen sink and opens the faucet. Helen once cut great gaping slits into her thighs in the bathroom in the dark and later pretended that she had done no such thing. She didn’t even have the sense to cover it up, just walked around for the next week with the cuts scabbing over, and occasionally oozing bloody pus into her slip. It had been quite near the end of things, and Julia had opted to ignore her as much as feasible for two women sharing a house and bed. She pretends for a moment that she doesn’t know how Kay would’ve handled something like that, but of course that’s ridiculously easy: Kay would have thought it all piteous and tragic and fawned over Helen for days on end, till the girl found it stifling. It’s a bit of a mystery, really, what the girl’s ideal is, if Kay’s too chivalrous and Julia herself too callous; quite possibly it involves a penis. Ghastly things.

The cup’s as clean as it’s going to be. She shuts off the water and contemplates breakfast for a moment. There really isn’t anything worth the trouble: early on, Helen had taken on the self-inflicted task of getting groceries, and she has not yet managed, three months on, to completely rid herself of the habit of expecting a reasonably full larder. She finds a tin of peaches lurking at the back which she can’t recollect purchasing; it’s pushing past its expiry date, but the fruit is quite good in its sugar solution. Probably Helen’s colleague at the introduction agency had got it for her, Vivienne something. Pretty girl, from what Helen had said, though of course it had been impossible to say anything of the sort to her arch, probing tone. She stabs the fork a little viciously into the next slice of fruit, spilling syrup on her wrist. It’s cloyingly sweet on her tongue when she licks it off, and almost turns her stomach. There isn’t a bit of bread in the house, which, she thinks vaguely, just goes to show.

She washes out the fork and dries it with the cup from earlier and puts both in the cupboard with stacks of plates in it. She keeps finding cups and cutlery in the strangest places, and cannot quite figure out whether it is that she doesn’t understand Helen’s system of organisation or whether there never was any such system. Likely the former, Helen always knew where everything was, and Julia has—once, briefly—seen her office, which looked quite well organised. There’s nothing to be done about it, she’ll have to spend a morning digging everything out and stacking it; make up her own system.

That’s that, then. She says it in her father’s voice, sounding it out in the empty flat. “Chin up, old girl. No point sitting around moping about things; you’ve a good head on your shoulders and you know what you’ve got to do. So you’d best do it, hadn’t you?” He’s been dead these two years; Kay’d come to the funeral, and it had all been tremendously awkward. Helen, of course, had begged off, and then been awfully weepy and apologetic about it. The War had been too much for him, not that he’d ever said a word; his second War, dust instead of mud, and he’d seen it through and weakened rapidly through armistice and peace. If she hadn’t been so caught up in the mess with Helen and Kay maybe she’d have noticed it, but he’d hidden it, in the event, quite well till nearly the end, not that it had taken very long. He’d died in the winter of ’45, bitterly cold, Kay’s gloved fingers clenched around her bare ones. They hadn’t spoken about Helen. After the funeral they’d walked a little distance to a pub and had a quiet drink. Kay’d been sixteen when they first met, lanky and coltish; Julia’s father had taken an immediate liking to her, and the three of them had spent a riotous Christmas together. That had been... God, that had been ’29; Kay’s parents had been visiting Gerald in Nice. So long ago. Damn, _damn_. Chin up, old girl.

In one of the drawers in her writing-desk is a fat notebook bound in calf leather painted a dark green, full of the addresses and phone numbers of all of Kay’s friends from the ambulance services. Kay gave it to her in the autumn of ’40, a month after joining up. Seven years ago, and phones ring endlessly and uselessly and the operator informs her that no such number is in use, again and again. In an hour she reaches two, one a woman called Elizabeth who has seen neither hide nor hair of Kay in thirty months and doesn’t much seem to care; the other a man called Andrew who it appears no longer lives at his old residence, nor can the answering voice tell her where he now is. She’d met Andrew a few times, back six years ago before he was twenty. The man who answered sounded old, even from her perspective in time; maybe he’s simply managed to break away from his parents and they’re still sour about it. It’s a better fate to conjure up than the deaths she’s afraid most of the others have met. It had had a rather high mortality rate, the war, for those who spent it climbing into wreckage and trying to save lives. She hopes he’s safe and happy, little Andrew Raynes; he’d been a sweet boy, if rather vapid. Kay had predictably made a pet out of him. If Helen had been a boy like Andrew, some girl’s anxious sweetheart... well, then she’d have missed out on three years of absolutely fantastic sex with a very beautiful, very willing girl, so that’s that. There are numbers yet to go, the oldest in faded pencil, even the newest a full six years old. She’d kept up the habit for some time after they separated, before locking away the diary; she’s used it just the once, between that day and this.

Mickey’s the last person she calls. Predictably she’s been postponing it, dreading the thought of dialling that particular set of digits on a level barely below the conscious. They had been best friends, once, and if anyone’s likely to have news of Kay, it’s Mickey. It’s how she’d got across news of her father’s death. It’s nearing midday by the time she takes a better grip of the receiver and jabs out the number.

Mickey answers on the third ring, before she can talk herself into slamming the receiver back onto its cradle. And then to the gruff hullo it’s suddenly difficult to say, “This is Julia Harding, I wondered whether you know where I might find Kay Langrish.”

“You’ve some nerve,” Mickey says, “calling up as bold as brass. D’you think I’m going to tell you where to find her, when it’s taken her two years to dig her way out of the pit you two put her in? You broke her heart.”

She says, quite without thinking—she has this unfortunate habit, around Kay, around Kay’s old beloved friends, of reverting into the outspoken headstrong girl she used to be—and with some volume and vehemence, “She broke... damn, forget that.”

“No. Don’t think I will. But even so, you’ve got to see, Miss Harding, that what you did to Kay was rather worse than what Kay did to you. She just fell in love, whereas you...”

“I would prefer... do you know where she is? Mickey. Do you know?” In another minute she will be snarling, in five she will draw every bit of the condescension of which she is capable around her like a cloak and then there won’t be any getting sense out of Mickey. The trick is to keep breathing. Kay’s arm around her waist, weight hanging as she leaned down to whisper in her ear. _The trick is to keep breathing, Julia; don’t freeze up_. She can’t remember what had brought it on, they’re very young in her memory of it, Kay’s hair in heavy tumbling braids down her back: something in school, probably.

“I’m not going to tell you, even if I do know.”

“But then you _do_ know, or else you’d simply have said you didn’t. Mickey, please. I’m not denying that I’ve... done wrong; I’m simply asking for the chance to make amends.”

“You want me to set her up to be hurt all over again so you get the chance to apologise, is that it? And I bet my last shilling you don’t think that that’s selfish.”

She is beginning to get frantic. It’s ridiculous and more than faintly awful. In the three years of her unhappiness, in the first year of Kay’s, she could at any time have begun moving towards resolution if she had glimpsed its desirability. Now she has to argue her way into a single meeting with Kay past an ignorant, obstinate, unlettered dyke who couldn’t find her own arse with both hands and a map. Keep bloody well breathing.

Once more into the breach. She says, “It’s the first unselfish thing I’ve done in years, I think. She was my closest friend and I know what I did was horrible, and I... I would do anything to set things right. I only want to see her once. Mickey, _please_.”

Mickey considers the matter in an almost audible pause. Julia fancies that if she listened closely enough she might hear the creaking of unused cogs spinning laboriously into place, balancing the ethics of it all. Poor Mickey. Eventually the result comes creaking out. “Okay. But I gotta ask. Are you still with Helen? Because I’m not leading Kay into that trap; it’ll be more than I’m worth, getting her to come out of the hole she’ll dig after seeing you two.”

“That’s been over some time. You’ll set it up?” The awful waiting, nearly as horrible as anything she’s ever had about a response from her publisher, while Mickey ponders an already made decision.

“I’m going to regret this. D’you know a club called The Gateways? It’s in Chelsea. Be there tomorrow evening.”

“I’ve been a couple of times.” More than a couple of times, but never with Helen; it’s not too far from Ursula’s flat, and she’s even taken Richard, once, but Ted Ware wouldn’t let him in whatever explanations they offered. They’ve had trouble with men coming in to ogle, before.

“So you know tomorrow’s Saturday. Saturday at The Gates, you dress right if you want to be let in.”

“I shall. Mickey? Thank you.”

“Of course. And Julia? If you put a single toe out of line I’ll kill you myself.”

 

Saturday nights at The Gateways you come in full rig if you want to be allowed in, and Ted Ware is a harsh judge under the affable seeming. Julia stands looking through her dresses in the bedroom she used to share with Helen and feels odd and matronly and mannish and quite impossibly unlike the sort of girls Kay likes. The room is its usual mess of clothes and bits of costume jewellery, though less of the latter now that Helen’s gone. Kay would hate it, would consider taking up a job as a char-woman for the simple relief of seeing it clean. It’s ridiculous how much thoughts of Kay have crept into everything, and how easily, as though she’s always thought them and only just allowed herself to realise it. There’s a red silk dress in the back of the closet, which she’d decided against wearing to Caroline’s party, which will do quite well with her hair brushed back and her face made up a touch more than usual; she has the shoes for it stashed somewhere. At least one of her warmer coats should still pass muster, as well; though she’s beginning to care enough about all of it that she wouldn’t be entirely averse to calling on her parents’ house to borrow one of her mother’s furs: there’s a fox she’s always had her eye on.

It’s all hideously absurd. When she was twenty-five, twenty, she hadn’t been enough the girl for Kay, who had wanted a wife, really, to keep house for her, and not a bohemian who found climbing walls almost as exciting as she did herself. Well, she’ll do what she’s promised Mickey, apologise handsomely, and then start in on something new: her next book, at this rate, it’s the only thing she’s half good at since the war. _Sicken and So Die_ needs a last turn, but it’s quite pleased Richard, so it shouldn’t take much more work.

She thinks, briefly, of calling Ursula and talking to her about it, but it feels impossible to break the silence, after such years of it. Besides the three of them, maybe Mickey knows, and then certainly not all of it. Even Helen, really, knows of it only where it touches her own life. In their circles it’s difficult to keep secrets, but Kay is the sort who would sooner die gut-shot than betray a friend. Kay should really have been a knight, except she would probably have hated the muck and blood of medieval reality; her flat’s got off a whore but looks like priests used to live in it, or doctors. Someone from the stories, then: Sir Kay, going about putting Camelot to rights, cleaning up after careless lords and ladies in his spotless suit of armour.

She takes the dress from the hanger, pulls it over her head and twists to button it, smoothes it over her stomach and hips, presses powder over her face and makes up her mouth. In the clear light of day she looks strident, too harsh, but in the dimness of the Gates she ought look about alright. She’s nothing to swoon over, but she’s not trying to pick anyone up, and if it weren’t Saturday she’d probably go in an old skirt and a jumper. Kay will be in a suit, but she wears that anyway, day in and out, keeping the Army and Navy Surplus Stores in business almost single-handed. For one mad moment she wants to go in a suit herself, but fights between the butches are tolerated at the Gates, and she doesn’t want to give Kay further incentive to knock her flat. In any case, none of her ensembles would pass for a suit to Mr. Ware’s discriminating eye, put together from her own trousers and jackets she’s stolen variously from her father and Richard and once upon a time from Kay; her old school blazer’s somewhere in the pile as well, she wouldn’t doubt, with the prefect’s braid still wound about one sleeve. She’d made Head of House, the year after, but Kay’d had stayed on as Head of School, doing an extra year instead of carting off to Switzerland for finishing school. She’d thought it had been for her, to keep her company; maybe it _had_ been, they’d already been close.

She makes herself buy groceries in the afternoon, and makes and bolts a sandwich before running a bath. Her feet ache, and look webbed and strange beneath the water. She feels all parts of herself keenly, disjointed and estranged: the narrow shoulders, the long legs, the breasts beginning to sag, the hips growing wider in her sedentary existence, the curve of the shoulder to which hair is sticking wetly. She stays submerged for a long while, twisting awkwardly to wash her own back, before unwinding her hair from its handkerchief and beginning to wash it out; it’s beginning to get long, reaching well past her shoulders and touching her wing-bones. The air is a shock against her skin when she steps out of the tub: the tips of her fingers prune and her nipples harden, creasing the areolae into strange shapes. The nap of the towel feels harsh against her too-tender skin, like a calloused hand smoothing over her body. And that’s the second time in as many days that she’s caught herself thinking like one of her own heroines, and enough really is enough. Managing her hair’s going to be enough of a nightmare without adding other tangles to it.

 

* * *

 

Ted Ware is leaning against the front facade of The Gateways smoking a hand-rolled cigarette when she climbs out of the cab. He straightens up quickly and grins at her, which is more than passing strange. She knows him socially, though very vaguely—he and Ursula’s husband are close, or used to be—but his glee seems strange impersonal. There is no earthly reason for him to be so damn happy to see her; it makes him look almost handsome as he bows her down the stairs and follows at a slower pace. “Miss Standing. Always a pleasure to have you here.”

“I’ve been neglectful, I know.” She last came nearly four months ago, on a day Helen had gone home to visit her parents, and only after she’d phoned to say she would stay the night with them.

“If these are the results I get I’ll live with the waiting.” Again the damned smile. Most days she would gloat about a string of smiles—such smiles—even from Ted Ware, but tonight she’s a neurotic mess; it gets on her nerves.

“Mr. Ware, do I have clowns coming out my ears?” She leans in to sign the register, elbows planted inelegantly on the blotter, fur slipping off one shoulder to meet the edge of her opera gloves.

Ted shakes his head, still clearly trying to suppress a smile. “Oh, just go in; I shan’t spoil the surprise if you two didn’t plan it.”

So after all it’s only that some other girl has come in Julia’s own rig, maybe even in the exact colour. Well, it’s not exactly an uncommon get-up, after all. She smiles at Ted and shoulders through the door, hardly waiting for her eyes to adjust before looking round for her doppelganger; best to get the triviality of social embarrassment over with before starting in on the real humiliations of the evening.

It’s a big enough place, The Gates, and crowded enough even at eight on a Saturday evening that she might easily be missing someone, but of the twenty or so femmes present none is in so much as a floor-length evening gown, let alone one in the same cut and colour as hers. Ted Ware is entitled, after all, to his private humour, or maybe it is as simple as a case of thinking her ridiculously overdressed, in her sweeping dress and opera gloves and fur wrap; she hasn’t worn anything like it in some years, not since before the War. No, just after it had begun, really. Diana had turned thirty in the summer of ’40, and they had had a defiantly splendid bash while the Jerries blitzed London; Kay’s mother had laughed and said it was like the parties she’d been to just after the GreatWar, gimmicky and madly fun. She’d worn, God, this very dress with her mother’s rubies and felt very glamorous. That night they’d broken the clasp on the bracelet and she’d ended up on her hands and knees in Diana’s bedroom hunting for the damned thing under piles of coats while Diana and Kay sat on the floor and howled with laughter. Alcohol had still been fairly easy to come by, and they had all been rather smashed.

_Quite_ like the girl leaning blearily into her, in a too-large suit that makes her awkward and oddly formed, mumbling out a request to dance. God, the liquor on her breath, and the bar scarce open yet, Chris doffing her jacket and rolling up her white sleeves. Must have needed the drink to manage to come in, and yes, after all very young, with her chin held in Julia’s hand and tipped back to the light: perhaps twenty, though likely younger. Poor child.

Chris grins impudently at her when she approaches the bar, teeth very white in the lighting: the bar’s near about the one part of the club that isn’t dim, though it’s going to be busier than almost any other, butches standing three deep waiting for their alcohol and too-gallantly carrying their dates’ drinks back to tables and convenient corners. There are a few especially thirsty early birds already gathering, but they let her through. Once, just after the club had changed hands, Sam had been told to find a butch to get her drinks for her: Ted had ended up having to interfere.

Someone asks her for a dance while she’s getting the drink, and is refused by a familiar voice before she can do it herself. Mickey at her elbow looks in the dimness about as boyish as she had four years ago; doubtless more merciless light will expose the ravages of age, but it _is_ reassuring.

Mickey sets a hand around her elbow, about the silk of her glove, and steers her carefully out of the crowd. “Finish your drink, I’ll take it back.”

“She’s here?” The vodka burns briefly through her throat and settles in a warm glow in the pit of her stomach. She feels sick from nerves.

“And she knows why, too.” Mickey takes her shot-glass, and stands turning it end over end in her blunt fingers. “She’s by the piano.”

“Thank you, Mickey.”

Mickey nods at her shortly, mouth pursed, and says, ‘Aren’t both of you showing your class tonight,” before shouldering back into the gathering crowd at the bar.

At the piano an old black man is sending a crowd of butches through their stumbling musical paces. They’re all in suits, for Saturday, and cheerfully making up in volume what they sadly lack in pitch and rhythm. Kay is standing quietly and to one side, eyes scanning the room. She’s cut her hair recently, even shorter than usual: it looks quite like a boy’s, brushed neatly away from her face, and ending just above the collar of her tuxedo suit. She looks serene and unapproachable. More than anything, Julia wants to turn around and run away, but she _has_ to try her hand at an apology, and there is absolutely nil chance of something of this sort being arranged again. Kay lights a cigarette. Her hand trembles in returning the case to her pocket. It’s a slight thing, imperceptible from any distance. Julia has crossed the room without consciously deciding to, without even really noticing it. The women thronging around Kay look at them; one or two smile. They must look a matched set.

She cannot remember ever feeling less like smiling. Kay’s glance at her could hardly be less reassuring if she was sighting down a rifle. She says, all at once, before she can lose her nerve any further, “I want to apologise. About Helen.”

Kay says, “Yes, Mickey said something to that effect.” She pauses to put the cigarette case securely inside her pocket. “D’you want to get a table?”

 

In the little light on the table, Kay’s face looks the same shade as her shirt. Her posture is about as starched, and her face is inscrutable. When they were at school, a girl she had punished quite severely later came up and thanked Julia for not sending her up to Kay. Kay’s had more than fifteen years to perfect the expression of disdain. Julia feels quite like a first-former ragged up to the Head of School to be berated.

“I’ve been awful to you.”

Kay nods agreeably, finishes smoking her cigarette in three long drags. “Mickey said you’re no longer with Helen.”

“It ended a few months ago. She’s living with her colleague from the introduction agency where she worked. Girl by the name of Vivienne Pearce.” She doesn’t know what to offer Kay except the truth. She realises that she would grovel if she thought it might help.

“Viv Pearce? About twenty-five, beautiful in a pin-up girl sort of way?”

“You’ve met her.” More people are coming in now; one large party almost entirely composed by women in tailored suits. Mickey ducks through and ostentatiously makes her way to the piano.

Kay smiles, an odd wistful little thing, there and gone. “Twice. Neither time to do with Helen.” She touches her ring, once, and then again quickly.

She says, ’tranced and helpless, “You’ve kept my ring.” Helen had said as much, years and years ago, but she hadn’t been a traitor yet.

“I’ve only had it back for a few months.” It has a well-kept shine to it, and not the patina of use. But all that that means is Kay has made the conscious choice to put the ring back on her hand, even after everything. It is terrifying; she wishes for another drink, something to do with her hands. “I thought she wasn’t like us,” Kay says, smiles blankly. “You might say I’ve the ultimate proof.”

“I don’t think there’s any such thing, really. I’ve friends who’ve been married years and like women, you remember Ursula. But I do think they’re just friends.”

“Just friends. That sounds like a lovely thing to have. Friends.” Kay lights another cigarette, blows smoke into her cupped palm and fists it. “I think I’ve forgotten how to have friends, how one behaves with them, the method to it.” She leaves the cigarette case open on the table, exactly between them, and places her match-book perpendicular to it.

“You’ve got Mickey to practise on.”

“Yes. Mickey’s a brick. She keeps telling me about everyone in the vain hope of actually getting me to meet people.”

“Ten to one she tells other people about you for the same reason. Maybe that’s what she’s telling the redhead who looks so very terribly interested.” It gets Kay to laugh: a proper laugh that brings her shoulders out of their unnatural stiffness; Kay has always slouched arrogantly everywhere every when. “Really, I do think so, see how tactful they’re being, not a single glance at you.”

“I shouldn’t laugh; she might well be. She did it last week, or near enough.”

“Really? That’s terribly sweet, I think. What came of it?”

“Went home with the girl, did our Miss Carmichael, to the Sapphic chaise-lounge.” The term is a strange fragment of the past, something Kay used to say, when they were young, about the heaped divan before the fireplace in _her_ living-room—nothing remotely so untidy would have dared exist in Kay’s flat.

“I thought she was looking her out for you?” It’s an interesting thought, Kay with a stranger who does not matter very much, taking her efficiently to pieces. Kay had hated being touched, reciprocation of any kind had been anathema to her when they were young: girls like Kay did things, and girls like... well, not to girls like Julia, but like Helen and presumably most of Kay’s various conquests, have things done to them.

“I was too wounded and not nearly picturesque enough, I gather.” Kay stubs out the second cigarette; there’s a good inch of it left yet, and not like Kay to be so wasteful. “You’ve to wonder sometimes whether Binkie didn’t have the right of it.”

“What did she say?” She knows the old battle-axe, if only slightly; it isn’t likely to be remotely in the spirit of compromise.

“She was weighing the pros and cons of marriage versus our sort of hidden games; she came down on the side of marriage rather heavily.”

“I wouldn’t have thought it of her. Goes to show, I suppose. Are you really considering it, then? Wedded bliss with a man?”

It startles a laugh out of Kay. “God, no. Can you imagine, at my age?” She frowns, looks around a little for her cigarette case, and makes no move for it once it’s been located. “I don’t suppose anyone would have me, at that.”

When Kay was nineteen and had finally been wrenched away from school and all its safeties, she had put on a white dress and debuted. There had been roses in her dark curls, and she had drunk champagne for the first time and smiled endlessly. Julia had been eighteen and had thought she’d never seen anyone more lovely. She says, “Well, you’ve quite a lot of money, I understand that helps these things along.”

“Does it? Something to think about.” She turns to look at the dancers, and her profile is sharp even against the dimness of The Gates, and she looks at this distance of years still as terribly lovely, as dearly loved.

It makes the heart beat faster in Julia’s breast. “I could tell you where she lives. You could go see her, at her new flat; I’m sure she’ll be happy about it.”

Kay turns her head sharply to stare at her. “Have you gone utterly mad?”

“No. Kay. I doubt she ever stopped loving you, I simply turned her head. If you see her now, just once, she’ll be yours for life I should think. And she’s your perfect girl. I’m sorry,” she finishes, stumbling against something unfamiliar in Kay’s manner, “I took her from you. I should never even have met her.” She can feel herself growing short of breath, the music from the piano, the orchestra growing more subdued. “Kay, I’m sorry.” _Langrish, please, I’m sorry, it shan’t happen again_ ; is this how the younger girls felt, in Kay’s study at school?

“Julia.” Kay closes a hand about her wrist, applies enough pressure to draw it to the knife’s edge of imminent pain. “Keep breathing.”

She nods in less than a minute, head hanging, shoulders up. It’s deeply shameful. “Kay. I _am_ sorry.”

“Yes, I can see that.” It’s very dryly put, but her grip on Julia eases up, turns kind. Damn Kay and her easy strength. “I’m not absolving you. You more than anyone, you knew how I loved Helen. Your behaviour was execrable. But you didn’t take her from me. You couldn’t have, she’s not a doll. She fell in love with you; she cared for you more than she did for me, and she did what she wanted to.”

“I played her. I made her fall in love with me.” It is unbearable to be disallowed the right to grovel, to beg forgiveness. “I planned it all out.”

“Did you lie to her?”

“I let her think that you’d been in love with me instead of the other way around.”

“I as good as told her that myself. Anything else?”

She is half of the mind to create lies, but cannot think of any; Helen had come to her hand like a tame bird, it turns her stomach even now to imagine having used force or a deeper deception. “No.”

There is a slight smile tilting the corner of Kay’s mouth. “And you did love her, before things soured?”

“Nearly as much as I’ve ever loved anyone.” Helen in the mornings, deliciously rumpled, with that child’s halo of golden hair and that enchanting smile: it is a thought to make breath catch in the body. “It doesn’t change anything. She was still yours.”

Kay says, “I’m sure it doesn’t for you,” and fishes out and lights her third cigarette of the evening. “Now be a sport and go dance with Mickey, her redhead seems to have deserted her.”

“Kay.”

“If she hadn’t been out with you that night, Helen would have been dead. I haven’t forgotten that. Go dance with Mickey, I need a walk. Don’t leave The Gates.”

 

Mickey takes a look at her and climbs out of her chair. It takes some doing, there are six empty glasses in front of her and only one has lipstick stains on the rim. Chris mixes her drinks strong, in cheerful defiance of the war nobody ever talks about.

“I am under instructions to dance with you,” she says. “Though probably nothing more energetic than a slow waltz, under the circumstances.”

Mickey says, “I was never taught to dance. Catch my school doing anything fun.”

“I could teach you; I taught my cousins when they were young. Or I suppose we could flout orders and you could get me a vodka and tonic.”

“Is she being a martyr about everything?”

“Early Christian saints haven’t anything on her.” The Gates has mismatched chairs, left over from earlier incarnations: the ones around Mickey’s low table are properly poufs, and delectably decadent. She feels like a refugee from the roaring twenties, in her mother’s fur and rubies; she only needs a feathered headband and to shingle her hair. In 1929, she was sixteen years old and enchanted by Kay, who was already a prefect at the time, and favourite for Games captain and Head of House; she had hardly any notion as to the nature of the pull, low in her stomach, every time Kay smiled at her, and no idea at all as to what actions could be taken to ease or deliciously prolong it.  “She’s gone to get a breath of fresh air.”

“Do you want to dance?”

“I never want to leave this seat again.” She swings a little more upright, balanced on one elbow. “You might as well ask. I owe you a debt of gratitude, so you’re likely to get the unvarnished version of events.”

Mickey leans forward, elbows on both knees and hands clasped; she looks like a caricature of earnestness. “Why did you do it? Why make a pass at Helen? You knew that they were together.”

It is a relief to even think of talking about it. Mickey can be trusted to remember at least the fundamental truths and to pass it on as necessary, and Kay has resolutely refused to listen. She collapses on her back, hand clasped over her breast-bone: with armour and a sword between her gripping palms she could be a Knight Templar gone to devout rest. “I hadn’t intended to.”

Mickey’s brows knit mutinously. “Never heard of a woman accidentally making a pass.”

“I don’t intend to introduce new marvels in your life. Initially I just wanted to know what she was like, the girl Kay was so fascinated with. I’d met her once before, and she’d struck me as violently ordinary. I couldn’t puzzle out why Kay would be so mad for her. She was so good and untouched; I couldn’t believe that she’s close to our age, two years younger than me, three than Kay. Not so very young, after all, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her even now. Back then she looked like this golden lamb Kay’d found in some pastoral elegy, not even like the damned shepherdess. You remember, you were there the night Kay found her, she told me as much. Kay, I mean, not Helen, Helen hardly remembers any of it.”

“A knock to the head will do that to you.”

“Oh, yes. Kay remembered it perfectly, of course; it was the best thing that’d ever happened to her, she’d found the girl she’d been looking for her whole life, her perfect pearl. She was practically living my flat that month, but the next morning she packed away all her belongings—clothes, books, trinkets, all the evidence that her life spilled into mine—and took it back to her flat. She needed five boxes, none of them particularly large. In the evening she brought my things back in the same boxes. She told me that she was sorry, but that we were done, and she hoped that I would learn to love Helen like she did already.”

“Didn’t think you were that obedient, really.” But the derision has left Mickey’s face, and she’s stopped looking around.

“Oh God no. They came to my old flat once to return something Kay’d unearthed, and I loathed her on sight. I wanted to see what she was like, when I ran into her later. I wasn’t expecting much. More fool me.”

Mickey flicks her eyes up once, over Julia’s shoulder, and then says, “Why a fool?”

“I knew why Kay had fallen for her, of course. And of a rule I don’t find naïveté appealing, but she was simply so good, Mickey. Kind and sweet and this terrible innocence, like an infant’s. And beautiful, of course, like an English rose. I couldn’t make myself hate her, once we got to talking; even with everything that’s happened since, I can’t quite muster up the feeling. The worst you can feel for Helen is pity of the sort that Rochester says such smarmy things about when he’s trying to make Jane an accessory to his bigamy. The mother of love, and that sort of thing.” She wants a drink very badly, but if she stops now she’ll never finish, for all that it’s so much easier to talk to Mickey than to Kay.

She licks her lips gracelessly, drinks the dregs from one of Mickey’s glasses. “I did think, at the time, that I was going to behave properly and try and be friends with her. Apart from all other charitable concerns, I was missing Kay rather horribly, and you couldn’t be around her and not be around Helen. And then I realised that she was falling in love with me, which was ridiculous of course. But she found me more... attractive than Kay, I suppose, or she thought that Kay loved her too much.”

“And you were falling for her yourself.” She likes Mickey much better when she’s drunk. Inebriated she’s rather splendid.

“Isn’t it awful? But I was; I’m too much like Kay to not hold dear the things she loves, and Helen was so in love with me that it was intoxicating. I know you think I did it to hurt Kay, you’ve said as much. And I can’t deny that what I did must have been devastating for her, I can still see all the fault-lines where she’s cracked. But in the moment I didn’t think of her at all.” It had been a terrible freedom, the longest stretch in longer than she can remember that Kay had vanished from her thoughts, in the deep solace of Helen’s smile, Helen’s skin, the softness of Helen’s body.

Kay says, “I’ve been talking to Ted Ware. There’s the possibility of a raid; he’s going to announce it in a minute. I thought we might want to get out before the crush starts.” Her smile is hard as they help Mickey to her feet. As they reach the door, Chris drops a steel mixer from on high and the piano plays a swift, discordant chord. Ted Ware nudges the bassist off her podium and clears his throat.

 

A few cabs are idling outside The Gates, but Kay refuses to let them hail any. She puts her arm a little tighter around Mickey’s waist and keeps walking at a forcedly-normal pace, the sort of walk that wants to say “There’s nothing to see here.”, and inadvertently screams “I’m trying to get away with something.” People following them out of the club begin to get into the waiting cabs.

One block down a girl waves and smiles at them, and comes up to take most of Mickey’s weight. Kay gives her a quick, grateful smile, and says, “Mary Margaret, this is Julia Standing, an old friend of mine. Julia, this is Mary Margaret; she lives near Mickey and has offered to take her home and tuck her in.”

“We’ve left all the cabs at least half a block behind us.”

“That’s alright, I’ve got a car; I drove it up here after I heard what Ted was saying. A raid, can you imagine the nerve of it, like we haven’t got officers from the Met coming in all the time for a drink.”

“Mary Margaret and I were sharing a cigarette,” Kay explains. “How far is your car?”

“Just ’round the corner; here, I can take Mickey, can you get the door opened?” They get Mickey settled in quite easily, Kay moving with the ease of someone used to hauling about mangled bodies. “Shall I take you two home first?”

“No,” Kay says, kindly and finally. “I think we’ll manage. I’ll look in on Mickey tomorrow.”

Mickey, who has been quietly cooperative throughout, finally begins to look restive. “I’m not bloody well incapacitated, you know, I hardly even had three drinks.”

Mary Margaret—and oh, she is beginning to like this girl—says, “I’m counting on that.”

Kay takes her arm before the car has even properly started, but she is walking now at an easier pace. After a while, she says, “Another conquest for Mickey’s chaise-lounge.”’

“Does she actually have one? Is she still living in that boat?”

“She is, and she doesn’t. I’ll give her one for her next birthday.”

At the next corner they hail the hulking shadow of a cab. Kay opens the door for her and then stands irresolute after she has climbed in. Julia says, “You aren’t thinking of trudging all the way to Lavender Hill at this time of night, are you?”

“It’s hardly late, and it’s not _so_ far.”

“Kay. I’ve a spare room with a made-up bed. Come with me.” To have Kay under her roof, but she can’t think of that now or she’ll lose her nerve. Kay climbs in, and she ducks her head to hide a smile. “You can go back to hating me in the morning.”

Kay sighs and looks away, only the strong sweep of her jaw visible in the dim glow from the street-lights. Ten in the night on a Saturday, with the city barely out in its dancing shoes, and all she wants is to go home with Kay, even if they sleep chastely in separate rooms.

Kay says, “I’ve never managed to hate you, Julia; that’s always been the problem.” In the darkness between their bodies, she sets her dry palm on the curve of Julia’s silk-clad wrist, like absolution.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [A Patient Anasthetised Upon a Table](https://archiveofourown.org/works/852057) by [toujours_nigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel)




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